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Course Syllabus

Week 1 The Art of Art History

Good taste, which is becoming more prevalent throughout the world, had its origins under the skies of Greece....We are told that Minerva chose this land, with its mild seasons, above all others for the Greeks in the knowledge that it would be productive of genius.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann

Readings for August 29 Donald Preziosi, “Art History: Making the Visible Legible,” and “Art as History” in The Art of Art History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 13-30.

Week 2 The Canon and Its Authors

The author still rules in manuals of literary history, in biographies of writers, in magazine interviews, and even in the awareness of literary men, anxious to unite, by their private journals, their person and their work: The image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions; criticism still consists, most of the time, in saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh's work his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice: the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the author, which delivered his "confidence."

To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing.

Readings for September 14Meyer Schapiro, “Style,” Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, New York: Georg Braziller, 1995), 51-102.optional: Svetlana Alpers, “Style is What You Make It,” in The Concept of Style, ed. Berel Lang, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 137-162.

Note: consider the differences between Erwin Panofsky’s approach to studying Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego and that of Louis Marin. What does each scholar use as evidence? How do they “read” the work of art? How do they discern meaning?

Week 7 Gender/Bodies/Boundaries

For the most part, feminist theory has assumed that there is some existing identity, understood through the category of women, who not only initiates feminist interests and goals within discourse, but constitutes the subject for whom political representation is pursued. But politics and representation are controversial terms. On the one hand, representation serves as the operative term within a political process that seeks to extend visibility and legitimacy to women as political subjects; on the other hand, representation is the normative function of a language which is said either to reveal or to distort what is assumed to be true about the category of women. For feminist theory, the development of a language that fully or adequately represents women has seemed necessary to foster the political visibility of women. This has seemed obviously important considering the pervasive cultural condition in which women's lives were either misrepresented or not represented at all. (1)

If one "is" a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered "person" transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities. (3)

My suggestion is that the presumed universality and unity of the subject of feminism is effectively undermined by the constraints of the representational discourse in which it functions. (4)

Judith Butler

Readings for October 10Judith Butler, “Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire,” in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 1-34.

Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Women, Art and Power and Other Essays (New York : Harper & Row, 1988), 145-78.

No readings for October 12Discussion of research proposals. Note you must come prepared to discuss your original thesis statement as well as the research you have completed to date.

Week 8 Colonial/Postcolonial Interactions

Identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think. Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a 'production', which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation. This view problematizes the very authority and authenticity to which the term, 'cultural identity', lays claim.

Stuart Hall

What is at issue is the performative nature of the production of identity and meaning: the regulation and negotiation of those spaces that are continually, contingently "opening out," remaking the boundaries, exposing the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sign of identity or transcendent value--be it truth, beauty, class, gender or race...[W]here identity and difference are neither One nor the Other but something else besides, in-between...

Week 9 Seeing and Surveillance

The term "gaze" alerts us to the fact that a work of art, like a person, can seem to gaze or be gazed at. Within a work, gazes can be exchanged.

A work would confront the beholder, making the beholder responsible for the effect of the work, the act of looking and being seen becoming the subject of the work. This dependence on the beholder for its effect, however, gave the work the inauthenticity associated with acting for an audience as in theater.

Margaret Olin

Through his concept of the period eye Baxandall emphasizes the cultural-constructedness of vision, characterizes a set of viewing norms, and charts the manner in which artists responded to those norms in their works. Thus, although the social- and cultural-historical data that Baxandall harvests to produce the period eye is extensive, the concept’s explanatory focus is explicitly limited: it seeks to describe stylistic choices and developments. That said, the phrase possesses an inherent breadth, as if its temporal span and the panoramic opticality that it evokes can capture the essentials of a particular period’s visual culture.

Adrian Randolph

No Readings for October 31Margaret Olin, “The Gaze,” Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003), 318-29.

Week 11 The Spatial Imagination

Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception—or rather, by touch and sight. Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building. On the tactile side there is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit. As regards architecture, habit determines to a large extent even optical reception. The latter, too, occurs much less thorough rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion. This mode of appropriation, developed with reference to architecture, in certain circumstances acquires canonical value. For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation.

Walter Benjamin

Urban spaces acquired their meanings in part through their relationship to the built environment.

Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “Introduction: Fashion, Fetishism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Europe,” and “Composing the Subject: Making Portraits,” in Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1-14, 34-58.